K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Hardy continues to perform, even at 450Mhz

My default Hardy installation on my K6-2 is continuing to work well, with some minor glitches. Occasionally I lose the GTK theme, along with the concordant error about gnome-settings-manager (or something like that … I rarely pay attention to what Gnome tells me. It ignores what I want, so I ignore what it wants). Or there’s sometimes a bit of strange behavior with the menus and toolbars.

I have a feeling most of that is due to the fact that 450Mhz is just not enough to handle it all. Opening the Update Manager takes about 30 seconds, and that’s only up to the password prompt. After that, it can take two or three minutes to finally show me what updates are available. And checking the repositories is a two- or three-minute ordeal too.

Thus far my all-default, no added packages system starts in about 3:05 (that’s with an automatic login) — the average length of a crappy pop song. It’s a wee bit faster than earlier versions, but nothing to crow about. Trimming the splash screen does nothing to help that time; I didn’t expect it to, but I thought it worth trying.

Power down takes 23 seconds, which is acceptable. It’s always quicker to tear down than to start up.

Firefox starts in about 10 seconds to a blank page, and about 16 to Google Japan (I thought that more fair than trying a server that might be across an ocean). A terminal takes 9 seconds to open, and Nautilus takes about half again as long to show the home folder.

Disk usage is 2.3Gb, which I could swear is more than some other versions, but I might be wrong.

There are a few things that can be done to this to make it a little quicker, but I don’t know how much my patience will tolerate. Most of the tweaks I know are intended for a system that’s not so burdened. Applying them to the full Gnome setup will improve it, but only by a hair.